Hedion University

Amarr Empire

Back when plex were in the 350-500m range I used to sub 4 accounts and usually gave away a plex to some random nooblet every few months. During this time I could reasonably expect an income around 7~ish billion a month give or take based on drops and market flux. Comparing this to today where the ships available for my isk making are worse, the loot sold sells for around 30% or so of its previous prices in years gone by, it can be a challenge to get 2b out of exactly the same items, and take longer getting them.

Nowadays my brother and brother in law no longer play, so I have only my and my alt accounts to sub, forget handouts as it's too expensive to afford. However, upon recieving the 6 days left email for my alt account and looking at the market I decided today's 1.56b overwhelmed the benefits of having even my own alt active. As for the fate of my main account.... stale content is stale content. At time of posting it's less than 20K accounts logged in whereas at this time in summer it should be 30-35k around this time of day.

There are too many factors involved to say one thing drives the plex market one way or the other, but as I have very little RL money, the rising plex prices will eventually make an unobtainable celing where I'll have to walk away for good.

Very similar. I have two accounts to expire in next six days, i let one of them leave and the other must be active a month at least.

Problem is not real life money here, the problem is near impossible profit if you are non rorqualing or ratting in very high risk balance

All character bazaar done. Finally 39 pilot and 3 can be killed later. This account will be used only for forum interaction, fly safe.

Caldari Provisions

Caldari State

... looking at the market I decided today's 1.56b overwhelmed the benefits of having even my own alt active

You could do what I do, pay for the alt by farming his skill points. Sucks, but the benefits are worth it to me to keep him around.

Mhari Dson wrote:

... the rising plex prices will eventually make an unobtainable ceiling where I'll have to walk away for good.

Space job wages are taking a beating for sure! But my guys won't quit. I'm farming one account and using him to help my earner do what he does. I pay for my main and generally just have fun with him, while the second and third work to pay their bills and provide extra money for pewpew.

As I put this wonderful post together I did the math... costs doubled from 900M in May to a projected 1.9B in July when everything settles. That ceiling you mention is real. STRIKE!

Ministry of War

Amarr Empire

The concern here for me is PLEX has been turned into a consumer item, and thus subsequently an increase in demand exceeding that of supply has made plex more valuable, resulting in an increase of approximately 25% price of the last two months, by implication at this rate of change with no intervention to turn the market back to a buyers market rather than a sellers market we can expect a 100% increase in PLEX price by the end if market measures aren't taken.

Now, none of this is actually an issue except for the fact that technically it is generating artificial inflation within the economy of eve and one has to wonder whether the implications of this market shock was thorougly thought through as skill injectors and extractors are not converging at the same rate as PLEX, the other concern is the more PLEX rises it will discourage skill extraction leading to a rise in prices of skill injectors, lack of supply - scarce commodity, then skill extractors then again PLEX.

This is a perfect storm for artificial inflation creation, PLEX drives up Skill related items bought with PLEX, these item prices rise proporitonally/ marginally, which again further drives PLEX's due to the apparent appreciation of subsequent skill items. therefore unless PLEX stabalises the market will reach a point where the bubble will burst and CCP will much like a monetary institution step in and rectify the market failure.

Arbitrage pricing is out of control at the moment...

Aideron Corp

Power creep, inflation,items in cashshop that give an advantage, XP (injector) grinding,lots of cosmetic items, ...the game turns slowly into a F2P MMO.Back in 2011, CCP made these changes too fast which caused the summer of rage.Now they are using a slower, gradual approach. We are frogs and the water is almost boiling.

Sebiestor Tribe

Minmatar Republic

EVE has been free-to-play for a very long time, and going F2P is probably one of the few end-game goals for a PvE player (or really any trader or industrialist who keeps his losses limited). Not sure why people are whining in the worst passive-aggressive SJW-style that they will unsub their alts if plex prices remain high. It takes very little effort to keep an account running on skill extraction.

Still, the current mechanisms around skill extraction/injection distort not only the market but also the EVE universe in various ways. It is now clear that the player base is ok with pay-to-win, not only through a CCP-approved mechanism to convert $$$ to ISK, but also to convert $$$ to SP. Had CCP started out with directly selling SP through the NEX store the player revolt would have been immense. But I think that as the situation currently stands a move by CCP to stop skill extraction altogether and make injectors available through the NEX store would be healthy for the game, and CCP could probably convince most players of that. (Massive outrage by multibox miners to be expected.)

Netflix and Kill

Digital Vendetta

If something needs to be done, and I'm not sure there is a need, one potential way is to gradually limit the size of the PLEX vault (6000 PLEX maximum) and disallow PLEX from being stored in cargo holds/hangars at logout. If you try to log out with PLEX in a cargo hold or hangar, you get a warning, if you ignore the warning, the PLEX is destroyed when the client is closed.

Assuming there are millions of PLEX being "hoarded" this would put them into the market.

Doomheim

Revert to the old 1 plex = 1 month game time system (which I doubt CCP will do)

And/Or more importantly:

Find a way to stop speculators from hoarding plex. For all involved in buying up PLEX to horde as a means of increasing their wealth, this is an easy gravy train, because they more they do it, the more plex will go up, and the more they increase their wealth in the process, at the cost of slowly strangling the game to death.

The side effect of this is people decide plex is too expensive and start using less accounts, which decreases players logged in and is causing it to look as though EVE is losing players. Sadly people see this and then decie to quit themselves because people are sheep and they follow others. All MMORPG suffer from this fate. Player numbers declining signals to people that it's time to move on.

Seriously, fix this issue asap, or the playerbase will continue to shrink.

Avenger Mercenaries

VOID Intergalactic Forces

It's not rising 50M a day. The split into mini-PLEX has caused some inflation of the pricing, but it really isn't as bad as you're making out.

When i started playing a PLEX was 250-300M, it is now 1.3B. While it obviously has increased in price, it is in fact easier to afford for a new player now than it was then in my opinion due to increased access to higher paying content these days.

You mention you already bought 500 PLEX, how did you afford them?

EDIT : EvE is famous for it's player driven market. Suggesting CCP intervene and impose a maximum / minimum price rule is unlikely to garner good responses, and rightly so.

I realise 1.3B seems like a massive amount if ISK but you must understand that paying your sub with ISK is not supposed to be easy for newer players, and that your ability to generate ISK will rise a lot over the next year or so to the point where PLEX is not such a huge cost.

your not just paying for you sub with isk, someone else is spending $5 more so they can have instant isk and not grind. buy plex for your sub actually gets ccp more money compared to everyone paying their sub, every 3 plex is a 4th account sub that's actually not a player but made up in profits from the plex.

Universal Sanitation Corporation

If there is a need to keep plex around a certain price... the simplest way to do so is to introduce more plex to the economy.

I'm not sure if that's necessary or not... but if CCP decided they needed to drop the price of plex... then simple give every subscribed account X number of plex. The price will drop. Pretty simple.

If you need to drop it more... give away more plex.

If CCP create PLEX, those PLEX will be bought up by the rorqual miners and carrier/supercarrier ratters, and spent (via sub time and injectors) to create more rorqual miners and more carrier ratters.

Doesn't really matter.

More supply = drop in price.

If the current event were dropping 100 plex/500 plex instead of 1 and 5... plex prices WOULD go down. Random large scale give-aways of plex would also keep people from hording as they'd be in much more fear of a market drop when CCP decides to release a million free plex into the economy.

Remember, month salary in states like Ukraine is about 110-120 euro per month. Do you really think they will pay real money for subscription? Imagine 90 % of all russian speaking players left Eve all together.

Well if CCP no cares. i dont know how many time EVE can stay on the 1st plan compare to other game who are raising. i think its slowly going to die

RIP EVE <3

2003-2018?

Well, disregarding the "eve is dying" mantra... the crux is if CCP cares or not. When CCP determines the price is a problem they know what to do... increase supply. You'll see events like this agency one giving out 100/500 plex instead of 1/5. You'll see 50% plex sales rather than 10-15%. You'll see deals on subscription prices (like free MCT for those who up their subscription or "bonus plex" going to those who up their sub). All of those will drive down plex prices by either increasing supply... or by trying to convince plex-subscribers to use money which will decrease demand.

Until they do this... they either don't believe it's a problem yet or they are waiting in hopes of the market correcting it naturally. If high plex price is viewed as a problem it's not hard to fix. The fact they haven't shows they don't see it as a problem requiring intervention yet.

Remember, month salary in states like Ukraine is about 110-120 euro per month. Do you really think they will pay real money for subscription? Imagine 90 % of all russian speaking players left Eve all together.

So then how did they ever start playing in the first place? They would of had to of spent real money.

Aliastra

Gallente Federation

where exactly is their incentive to lower the price coming from... MMO games are moneyfarms. and plex is a cash crop. The way they introduced the plex on the purchase screen says it all. Buy 440 ples + 60 free for 19.95..... WTF is this? You know what this is right. When you go to the grocery store and an item you always buy is on sale for the price that was the regular price only days ago. That's not normal behavior. That's a scummy sales tactic there to trick dumb people into thinking they're getting some kind of special deal but anyone with a memory worth a damn knows it's all bullshit. *1 PLEX before the change was a month of game time and cost 19.95*Now 500 PLEX is a month of gametime and you can buy 440 for 19.95 but when you buy 440 you get 60 more for (free)WTF is this?By making you do extra unnecessary math the greed is obfuscated in confusion on the part of the players... CCP is starting to turn into Blizzard. What's next, digital collectors cards? Achievements for my steam account?

Caldari Provisions

Caldari State

I'm honestly a little confused as to what people are expecting CCP to do by threatening to let their PLEX run accounts expire.

Do you honestly think they care? CCP is a business, and alike all businesses they exist to provide a service or product and to make a profit.

People who keep their accounts subbed via PLEX don't pay CCP, and the people who keep the market supplied with PLEX will continue to do so regardless of whether some F2P players unsub or not. Fact is, CCP loses nothing if you stop playing.

That said, there are many ways to keep accounts subbed if you can't afford the monthly RL cash cost.

A decent account can produce over 1.8M SP's per month. Extract, sell on the market, keep the account subbed, etc.

This thread just reeks of spoilt entitlement, especially the people who have multiple PLEX'd omega accounts and are complaining they can't afford to keep all in omega state using ISK.

Honestly, if you have so much free time to spend literally dozens of hours grinding space money, go out and grind some RL cash for that apparently oh so expensive £10 monthly sub fee.